Many retail stores offer tens thousands of goods for sale to the consumers. To offer such a substantial amount of goods in one store, retailers require stores of considerable size. For example, some stores include hundreds of aisles to store the goods. Given the size of such retail stores, consumers may find difficulty navigating the store to locate goods, entrances and exits, registers, restrooms, popular departments, and the like. Furthermore, the larger the retail store, the more difficulty the consumer typically encounters. As such, consumer satisfaction with the retail store may decrease if the consumer encounters such difficulty.
There have been attempts to offer consumers an indoor map for mobile device apps, which shows contextual information, such as the location of goods, in relation to the floor plan of the store. Such conventional maps can be zoomed-in by the consumer to focus the map on a specified area in the store. However, because the retail environment is so large, the zoomed-in area provides the consumer with substantially restricted perspective of the store, as a whole, (e.g., only about 8-10 aisles or 2.5% of the store). Moreover, when such conventional maps are zoomed-in, the useful contextual information otherwise present on the map when zoomed-out is obscured. For at least this reason, conventional maps are often inconvenient, inefficient, and incomplete, thereby increasing the difficulty of store navigation and causing consumer dissatisfaction.
The present invention is aimed at one or more of the problems identified above.